There Is No Side Worth Taking In Gaza

My friend, the invaluable court-watcher Dahlia Lithwick, is on book leave in Israel and she has had an actual war dropped into the middle of her sabbatical. She's taken to writing about it too, with all the judicious and reasonable empathy that she brings to all her work.

I don't know how to talk about what is happening here but it's probably less about writers' block than readers' block. It says so much about the state of our discourse that the surest way to enrage everyone is to tweet about peace in the Middle East. We should be doing better because, much as I hate to say it, the harrowing accounts of burnt-out basements and baby shoes on each side of this conflict don't constitute a conversation. Counting and photographing and tweeting injured children on each side isn't dialogue. Scoring your own side's suffering is a powerful way to avoid fixing the real problems, and trust me when I tell you that everyone — absolutely everyone — is suffering and sad and yet being sad is not fixing the problems either.

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I'm with her. I would like to have an opinion on this continual bloodletting that didn't sound banal but, goddammit, I'm out of them. I am thoroughly sick of both sides here. Opportunistic cutthroats poke a stick at the region's most powerful military, knowing full well that said military will overreact and that the overreaction will fall most heavily on the civilian population on whose behalf the cutthroats are allegedly acting. Said military reacts right on cue, with all the modern military hardware against which the cutthroats know that they and the people they allegedly represent have no possible defense. Innocent people die. Then more innocent people die. (This, by the way, is how, down through the decades, the IRA went from being a legitimate vehicle of Irish nationalism to being in many places simply a criminal gang.) Then people start talking about how the innocent people are not really innocent, you know, because of historical grievance, whadeedoodah. (Time once again to quote Mr. Joyce about history and nightmares.) Again, and on and on and on. And, on this side of the Atlantic, people on one side start writing stuff straight out of der Sturmer. (The president is supporting Israel because he "will need help from a lot of ardent Zionists in powerful places." What, no puppet strings?) There are very few issues on which I feel utterly hopeless. This is one of them.

The only people who make me more ill than the two active sides in this endless slaughter are the people far from the killing grounds who are so very goddamn sure they know what to do. Back in the day, I hated all those smug American Irish who financed the arms deals that helped keep Northern Ireland bleeding. (In fact, the first time I ever heard of Bono was when he called out people for bankrolling civil wars that were not their own.) I hate the cheering squads over here today just as much. Nobody knows anything. I wish American arms and American dollars weren't being used to demolish entire impoverished neighborhoods, but not more — or less — than I wish that people would realize that firing rockets willy-nilly into populated areas isn't a path toward anything but destruction that will fall on combatants and non-combatants alike. People are waiting for the president to do something, but what is to be done? He happened to be correct the other day. No country can tolerate the bombing of its citizens. (And, yes, I know about the drones.) In fact, that is precisely what Hamas was counting on. It got the retaliation it so desired. And, I suspect, Benjamin Netanyahu and his government got the retaliation in kind upon which it was counting.

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These are two rough beasts, counting their calculations in bodies and death. Right and wrong are painfully thin concepts. I am finished trying to parse out virtue in bloodshed. Maybe there's a ceasefire. Maybe there isn't. The only thing I care about is that the ceasefire may keep people safe, including my friend Dahlia and her family. But there is no side worth taking in this. Not any more. It's just tangled slaughter and bloody ambivalence and blind, unending fury. There is nothing but madness at its center, implacable as gravity, and drawing everything toward it.

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